Unless otherwise indicated herein, known approaches described are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion throughout the present disclosure.
Communications networks are generally packet-switched networks that operate based on Internet Protocol (IP). When a source device has a large amount of data to send to a destination device, the data may be transmitted as a series of packets via one or more intermediate devices along a path between the source device and the destination device. Path maximum transmission unit (PMTU) is the maximum size of a packet that can be transmitted from the source device to the destination device without requiring fragmentation. Any packet that is larger than the PMTU is generally fragmented or discarded.
Packet fragmentation and reassembly is generally undesirable because it unnecessarily wastes processing and network resources. Fragmenting a packet generally involves dividing the packet into smaller fragments, which causes more overhead for the destination device to wait until all fragments are received and to reassemble the fragments. Also, since each fragment generally has the same header overhead as the original message, the total number of bytes that needs to be transmitted increases. This may in turn slow the transmission down and adversely affect any guaranteed quality of service (QoS).